I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. I have also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I hold doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University. Disclosure: The Lexington Institute receives funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and United Technologies.

Replacing Old Military Aircraft With Modified Jetliners Could Save $100 Billion

KADENA, JAPAN - FEBRUARY 24: US Air Force E-3 AWACS plane makes a landing approach at the Kadena Air Base on February 24, 2010 in Kadena, Japan. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

As the U.S. military gradually extricates itself from overseas conflicts, the inevitability of shrinking budgets has begun to dominate Pentagon deliberations. Whether or not sequestration of funds is triggered in January as currently mandated by law, it seems clear the only thing that can save the joint force from big budget reductions is new threats. With no such threats on the horizon, military planners are debating which defense capabilities the nation can do without.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Department of Defense wastes huge amounts of money on outdated business practices, excessive employee benefits, and weapons programs that never fully deliver on promises. Reducing budgets could force the Pentagon to eliminate some of this waste. However, the tendency when reductions come is to cut technology first because that produces the least political fallout. This has the paradoxical effect of foreclosing some of the biggest opportunities for saving money.

A case in point is the Air Force’s aging fleet of about six dozen surveillance and intelligence-gathering planes. The planes typically carry radars that can track airborne and surface targets, or they have sensitive listening devices for monitoring hostile transmissions. You’ve probably heard of the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, better known as AWACS, that uses a rotating radar to track enemy planes and coordinate air campaigns. AWACS is a big part of the reason why no U.S. soldier has been killed by hostile aircraft since the Korean War.

But like the other planes in the electronic fleet, AWACS is getting old. The 31 AWACS planes the Air Force currently operates average 35 years of age. The 16 Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) planes that track ground vehicles such as tanks average 45 years of age. And the 17 Rivet Joint eavesdropping planes — the phrase doesn’t mean anything — average nearly 50 years of age. Other aircraft in the fleet are of similar vintage.

Old aircraft are expensive to maintain. Airframes suffer from age-related maladies like metal fatigue and corrosion. Spare parts are hard to find, and expensive when you do find them. Engines are notorious fuel guzzlers. Software and cockpit displays sometimes are decades out of date. So even though the U.S. Air Force still leads the world in airborne reconnaissance, much of its electronic fleet is ready for delivery to the Smithsonian Institution’s aerospace annex.

The Air Force saw this problem coming a long time ago, and had a plan to replace most of the planes with a new multi-mission electronic aircraft. But visionaries around Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld killed the plan because they thought tracking of airborne and surface targets should be done in the future from space. By the time engineers determined how impossibly difficult and expensive that would be, the next-generation aircraft was long gone. As a result, the Air Force today has no real plan for replacing a vital part of its fleet.

The current budget environment discourages Air Force leaders from even developing such a plan, for fear the money might come out of programs to replace Cold War fighters and bombers. However, with a little bit of imagination the service could begin replacing its radar planes and other aging airborne sensors for no more than what it already plans to expend on sustaining the existing, decrepit fleet. The solution is to forego developing new military aircraft and simply modify commercial airliners to do the missions.

This is not an original idea. When AWACS was first proposed in the 1960s, Boeing wanted to design a new aircraft for the mission. But tests showed its existing 707 airliners, already being used in modified form by the Air Force as aerial-refueling tankers, could do the job just fine. So that’s the plane that was adapted to the AWACS mission, and a variety of other electronic missions that followed.

At the time, using the four-engine 707 looked like the low-cost solution. Today, it looks different because the technology employed in the first-generation commercial transport has become so dated. But the economies of scale associated with operating the same airframe in a variety of configurations still are compelling. The Air Force just needs to find the right jetliner as a replacement — meaning a plane with the optimum combination of carrying capacity, fuel efficiency and easy maintainability.

It turns out that the Navy has already found that plane, and it’s the Boeing 737 — the most widely used single-aisle commercial transport in the world. The sea service selected the 737 as its next-generation maritime surveillance plane some years ago, and has now begun taking deliveries of what it designates the P-8 Poseidon. Eventually it will buy 117 of the planes, a far smaller number than its previous inventory of submarine-chasing patrol planes because the new aircraft is so much more efficient. Navy officials say the program has progressed well, and will yield big gains in life-cycle costs.

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